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Web Marketing for Real Estate

By March 5, 2019February 23rd, 2022No Comments

Over the years, we’ve been able to garner experience in a wide variety of industries and fields. From municipalities & universities to carpet cleaning companies and herbicide manufactures, we’ve enjoyed getting into each market and learning what makes the industry work, and what marketable items exist.

Some areas, however, deserve special attention for both media production and marketing potential, and the real estate market is one of those. And to be clear, we’re not just talking about the financial viability of a market, but the specificity that is required to optimize for specific keywords, target individual demographics, and produce content that works for an industry that’s so large and demanding.

So, what do you do?

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The Nitty Gritty

We love Nathan Cool. Take a look at his channel and see what else you can glean from his work.

The goal for every real estate agent or realtor (there’s a difference) is to have your work end – not that they aren’t satisfied with your service, but rather there is an incredibly small amount of product available to be marketed compared to any company that produces a widget or is trying to market a service. If you’re trying to sell a home, once that home is sold, you stop trying to market it.

This idea brings up a variety of issues for a web marketer, especially for organic search engine optimization as that specific service can take months to get going for a set of keywords in a specific area. Plus, with the physical location of the “product,” being such a huge factor in real estate, there just won’t be time to utilizie all of the local SEO factors into your content.

It’s almost impossible to run an organic SEO campaign for the real estate market for individual listings. You can try and run campaigns for real estate companies as a whole, marketing broader real estate keywords instead of selling a particular home or a particular neighborhood, but the with the main purpose of the agents to remove the content from the website within 30 days (selling a home within 30 days), you’re going to have a hard time building out a well-thought-out SEO campaign to sell a single listing.

We get many requests from agents that run specific subdivisions, trying to sell very specific terms like townhomes or condos, which is a much more “SEO-able” set of keywords. However, when it comes down to it, most web marketers will end up recommending a combination of paid marketing techniques and leveraging social media for the quickest results.

Think about the marketplace you’re trying to digitally sell a home in. Your market may be flooded with other listings, there may be tons of homes in your price range. When it comes down to it, the way you market your listing online can be summed up into 2 methodologies – make it memorable, and then get it out there.

1) Make it Memorable

aka Produce. Great. Media.

This is a little self serving seeing as we produce real estate media picture and videos, but no agent will deny that better pictures sell homes faster, and can bring in more money per square foot than otherwise. Yes, your phone takes “fine” pictures. But if you’re willing to pay a professional to compose, light, and capture fantastic, magazine-worthy images of your listing, you’re going to end up being far more satisfied with your sale.

The same goes for video production. You can create a quick home tour on your phone, or Canon Powershot as you walk around a home, turning around corners and shaking your hands. You can even take your still images and turn them into a slideshow in iMovie. However, the quality of video production or even a 3D VR virtual tour is proven to make a measurable impact on the sale of your home. Song choice, logo animations, and more should all be considered when producing your video for your listing.

2) Get it Out There

In the end, it doesn’t matter how great your pictures and videos are if no one sees them. And if you’re having trouble marketing your website for search engines using traditional SEO methods, you’re going to need to explore different strategies.

  1. Your listing MUST be on Realtor.com, Zillow, etc.
    • If you’re not leveraging the huge user base that these 3rd party websites have, you’re going to have a hard time selling a home. This needs to be one of your first steps.
    • Consider promoting your listings on these sites as well. Many, if not most, will let you spend a little cash to get your listings first, or most prominently, on their site.
  2. Pay-Per-Click Marketing
    • This is probably the most technical of the strategies we mention, but it can be incredibly effective, especially for larger real estate companies or popular agents. Take the time to use Google’s Keyword Planner and see huge much budget you should allocate to a PPC campaign. If you spend $500 to sell those last couple homes in your neighborhood, it was totally worth it.
  3. Social Media (Paid and unpaid)
    • Don’t discount the value of social media in the real estate market. There’s a significant amount of clout to be had by having your listing shared across people’s news feeds. Get your listings onto your social platforms, and make sure your best looking pictures are first.
    • The Facebook or Instagram “Boost” functions are incredibly useful and effective. Don’t be afraid to spend $10 over a couple days to make sure your listings get seen.
    • Within the Facebook advertising portal, you can introduce Geofencing as an advertising medium. You can select specific areas to market your listings, or even you business, draw a polygon around those areas on the map, and then whenever a user enters that polygon, they are eligible to receives your ads. This can be incredibly effective when marketing a block of homes or a specific community over another. Facebook also has great tool to refine your targets like “recent movers,” or “VISITORS in an area,” which will only target people passing through your geofence, not those who permanently live there.

The Point

We could spend days discussing the different possible marketing strategies for your home building or real estate company. Even if you’re an individual and just listing your home yourself, there’s information for you here, but it’s certainly not all-encompassing. With so many avenues available to you to sell your home, however, you shouldn’t have to worry about if your listing will sell, just how much it will sell for.

There are an infinite number of strategies for web marketing for real estate, and we’re certainly not going to try and cover them all here. The information we provide here, and especially on real estate media topics, are the elements that work best for us, not necessarily for everyone in every market.

Hire a digital marketing agency in Alabama that understands how to best reach your local customers, while also being able to scale your business to a national market.

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